Application-aware techniques for energy efficient data collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are distributed systems composed of battery-powered nodes that sense and collect information about the physical world. They enable applications in a wide variety of domains including but not limited to environmental monitoring, health care and disaster management. In such applications, nodes communicate the sensed information over multiple radio links until it reaches its destination referred to as the sink. As wireless communication is the most energy hungry operation, the data collection causes the biggest drain from battery. This motivates research on energy efficient mechanisms for data collection. Though there is a plethora of protocols proposed in research literature, they are not designed to collaborate with the applications. One opportunity from such collaboration is exploiting complete knowledge about application characteristics to make data collection more energy efficient. This enables underlying layers not to provision the resources more than the needs of the application and therefore save valuable battery power. The aim of this thesis is to explore a complex interplay between application characteristics and adaptive mechanisms across network stack using concrete real world deployments. It will propose a generic framework that integrates the adaptations to achieve near-optimal energy efficiency for heterogeneous applications.